On Thursday, February 19th, 2015, I’m visiting Five College Digital Humanities (5CollDH) in Amherst, Massachusetts to take part in their Digital Humanities Speaker Series. 5CollDH is a consortium for digital humanities at Amherst College, UMass-Amherst, Hampshire College, Smith College, and Mt. Holyoke College.Here’s a brief description of my talk, drawn from my current book project, Postcolonial Digital Humanities, which is under contact with Northwestern University Press. Specifically, my remarks are based on my first chapter, which considers theoretical connections between postcolonial theory and digital humanities, and the second chapter, which looks at key concepts in the postcolonial digital humanities.

Over the past few years, scholars within the digital humanities and new media studies such as Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, and Amy Earhart have raised important questions about the role of culture criticism in the field of digital humanities. More recently, interventions like #transformDH and #dhpoco have built on their work, looking for frameworks for situating digital humanities in relation to questions of difference: race, gender, nation, class, sexuality, and disability, among others. This talk considers the theoretical frames subtending my work with #dhpoco, at the juncture of postcolonial studies and the digital humanities. Examining questions of language, knowledge production, and subjectivity, I reflect on the ways postcolonial studies contributes to critical digital humanities, as well as the limits of postcolonial theory for the digital humanities.

[…] tempered with some more cultural criticism such as suggestions offered by Alan Liu, Adeline Koh, or Roopika Risam, for example. The problem is not simply a case of humanities versus sciences. Drucker suggests that […]